8.1 Bare Act Provisions
7. Meetings of the Commission.— The Commission shall meet at such times and places and shall observe such rules of procedure in regard to the transaction of business at its meetings as may be provided by regulations made under this Act.
8.2 Explanation
Decisions in the UGC are made during meetings. Section 7 describes how these meetings are conducted and how many people must be present. By defining the Chairman and Vice-Chairman as members u/s 2(d), the Act ensures their presence counts toward the official headcount needed to make legal decisions.
Section 7 is a procedural enabling provision. It does not dictate how the Commission must act but delegates the authority to the Commission itself to frame Regulations under Section 26 to govern its internal conduct. The core legal principle here is that the transaction of business must follow the due process established by these regulations. If a decision is taken in a meeting that does not follow the prescribed quorum or notice period, that decision can be challenged as legally infirm.
The powers of the Commission to take all such steps as it may think fit for maintaining standards under Section 12 are exercised through its meetings. For a regulation to have the force of law, it must be deliberated upon and passed in a validly constituted meeting as per Section 7.[1] Once the Commission observes such rules of procedure in its meetings, the resulting decisions or regulations become binding on all universities, provided they are notified in the Gazette.
8.3 Critical Analysis
Procedural Delay: Section 7 is a significant contributor to administrative sluggishness due to its reliance on Delegated Legislation. As the Act says meetings will happen as may be provided by regulations, any change in how the UGC meets requires a formal amendment to the Regulations. This involves drafting, approval in a meeting, and then laying the regulation before Parliament as required under Section 28. In urgent situations, such as a global pandemic or a sudden educational crisis, the rigid requirement to follow prescribed rules of procedure often prevents the Commission from taking swift, informal, or digital-first actions without prior regulatory changes. During the COVID-19 pandemic, the times and places of meetings became a point of contention. The Court had to intervene to validate the UGC’s guidelines on exams, highlighting that procedural delays in formalizing meeting outcomes can leave millions of students in uncertainty.[2]
Constitutional Validity and Ultra Vires: Section 7 faces a unique challenge regarding the Doctrine of Excessive Delegation. While Entry 66 of the Union List gives Parliament power over higher education, Section 7 gives the Commission, an executive body near-total autonomy to decide its own procedure. If the Commission frames regulations that allow it to take decisions without a minimum quorum or without representing teacher members as provided under Section 5, it could be argued as ultra vires to the parent Act and the Constitution. It effectively allows the Commission to bypass the legislative intent of a balanced, representative body. If the rules of procedure made under Section 7 go beyond the scope of the Act e.g., if they allow for secret meetings on public funding, they can be struck down as unconstitutional.[3]
Colonial Era Policy and Irrelevance: The language of Section 7 is a direct descendant of the 1919 University Grants Committee (UK) model, which relied on physical, centralized meetings in a specific place. The phrase “times and places” assumes a physical gathering. In 2026, the absence of an explicit provision for Virtual Meetings or Circular Resolutions within the parent Act is a colonial-era legacy. Relying on physical presence is not only cost-inefficient but also excludes members who might be experts living in remote or rural parts of India, thereby reinforcing a Delhi-centric bias in educational policy.
Room for Misinterpretation: The term “Transaction of Business” is dangerously broad and open to abuse. Does transaction of business include the power to delegate the Commission’s decision-making to a sub-committee or the Chairman alone? If the regulations under Section 7 allow a small Standing Committee to take major policy decisions, it defeats the purpose of the 12-member Commission established in Section 5. This has led to Regulatory Capture, where the bureaucracy takes over the role of the learned professional members through procedural technicalities.
In Mritunjay Tiwari v. University Grants Commission, which is a landmark stay on the UGC Equity Regulations 2026, the Supreme Court noted that the procedure followed in the meeting to approve the regulations was prima facie vague. The Court suggested that transaction of business cannot be used to pass exclusionary definitions, such as the restrictive definition of caste discrimination, without transparent and inclusive deliberation as intended by the spirit of the Act.
[1] University of Delhi v. Raj Singh [(1994) Supp (3) SCC 516]
[2] Praneeth K. v. University Grants Commission [(2020) 11 SCC 561]
[3] State of T.N. v. P. Krishnamurthy [(2006) 4 SCC 517]
